I'm having pretty much the same problem. I'm assuming with the cost basis of $0, it is wildly inflating my tax liabilities. Would love to fix this ASAP.

You seem too trusting.


It would largely depend upon how many Bitcoins they own, wouldn't it?

Wouldn't you like to go back in time and find out more about MtGox's security? For a group of people that value transparency and openness, you all seem to be missing the very large elephant in the room. You have no idea what the hands of the exchange owners are doing. I don't really appreciate being insulted because I dare bring up the idea that a bunch of strangers I've never met might not have my interests in mind. Continue to think like this and MtGox won't be the last large scale failure of this system. Yeah, I know a "bank" was robbed, and that's not reason enough to stop using "money". But if I have nowhere to reliably store it or exchange it, then this will remain the world's largest techie circl3j3rk.

I have no way of knowing that my ask of $15 isn't being held up in order to artificially prop up prices.

Is it not 100% obvious that exchanges must use OS software? I don't want to trade one set of crooks for another... we already have enough middlemen in the world rigging the game, ya know?

I'm sort of new to the world of Bitcoin, so excuse me if this is a stupid question:

I'm looking at this exchange bid/ask price and I've got this bid to buy. Its a little low, relative to the current exchange rate, but I notice that there are no takers. There's zero volume and no one will take me up on this offer.

Is volume that low?

Also, how do we know the exchanges themselves aren't manipulating prices?

What do we know about how these exchanges operate or about how this prices get determined? Are there currently offers out there at my price that are not being executed because the exchange operators have some sort of interest in seeing exchange rates set an artificially high price?

We don't know, do we?

Check out what this guy has to say on an inter-bank exchange mechanism. http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/i5lnj/mtgoxs_demise_provides_an_opportunity_to/

Volatility is an integral part of the price discovery process. Repressing volatility does not fix the underlying cause of the volatility.

If one or some exchanges decide to introduce circuit breakers, there no doubt would be other exchanges that would market themselves as insitutions that do not use them.

Let the weak players get pushed out. The system will be stronger in the long run.

We need some talk radio action. A nice summary of the days events in teh community might be nice to place between music now and then.

So, because the rich have gotten richer we should all just abandon this and let the Fed run the world.

Nice try, Ben Bernanke.

I'm not sure. I don't know if this is a scalability problem that will become chronic or if we just have a temporary problem to overcome.

There really shouldn't be any particular exchange that should have this kind of power to completely degrade the value of the currency. This seems like a really critical point of failure. It may be simply because there are only so many resources available, as far as volunteers and entrepreneurs who are available to deploy labor and capital, and thus temporary. I fear there is a small potential for this to become an ongoing problem, as I suspect the natural state of the market may eventually prefer only a handful of exchanges.

Maybe we need to adapt to this threat and build something into the system so there are no too big to fail nodes in this network?

I'm just throwin' some ideas out there to chew on, so here's something else...

We already have this concept of a node in the P2P network, which is essentially a machine running the Bitcoin client. And that Bitcoin client has a certain role in all this, which is well established. Maybe we need to introduce some sort of new concept. Perhaps a collection of nodes could act as exchanges.

Part of the problem, with regards to scalability, is staying within the limits of the $1,000/$10,000 trading rule.

One way to work within that limit is to make it easier to build exchanges, such as I suggested with some sort of OS framework that could be easily implemented, both quickly and cheaply.

Or, perhaps we need to add some new concept to the P2P network, where the work of the MtGox type exchanges could be off-loaded to some sort of anonymous, decentralized network. I'm sort of weak on implementation ideas on that option though.

Right, I agree, this is not some sort of signal about the failure of bitcoin, this is about the failure to apparently provide adequate security at one particular exchange. The real negative in all this is that having just one web site compromised caused such havoc in BTC value and trade volume. If we're gonna run a decentralized network, then let's run a decentralized network.

The primarily problem with this MtGox Affair is not that some poorly secured web site got hacked, the problem is that there are too few exchanges.

I propose we need to talk about the possibility of building some sort of open source, out of the box Bitcoin exchange solution. Maybe it needs to be some sort of toolkit, some sort of framework, or maybe some full blown system that you can get up and running quickly, and then make it easy for implementers to improve upon their exchange with contributions from the OS community.

In addition to immediately making it easier for far more exchanges to exist, this would allow for greater trade volume and increased liquidity, given the $1,000/day-$10,000 month rule.

This may sound ambitious, but not so much given that someone has already done a great deal of work to produce such an OS product -- MtGox.

I'm thinking that perhaps MtGox should be asked to release their framework to the public. Let us fix it and let's just get on with this thing. Because, let's face it, their reputation is absolutely trashed. But if we can bring transparency into the game, I have no reason not to trust a brand who has a product that I am capable of auditing.

Thoughts?

(Speaking as programmer of 10 years -- lots of experience with PHP, MySQL, JavaScript (Dojo. jQuery, Prototype), HTML, CSS)

Hello, Ed here, on the east coast of US. I've been waiting for something like bitcoin since I read Snow Crash back in '95 or so. These be some good times.